


Parallels

by Harukami



Category: DRAMAtical Murder
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-17
Updated: 2014-01-17
Packaged: 2018-01-09 00:33:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1139337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Harukami/pseuds/Harukami
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mizuki and Koujaku have a lot in common; Koujaku, at least, knows it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Parallels

The bar and tattoo parlor is closed, but there's a knock on the door regardless. It comes in a single set, gently, then is repeated again.

Mizuki considers not answering it -- he just got here, after all, and came here before he even went home, and someone watching his movements that closely is probably not a good sign, all things considered -- but then he hears through the door, "Hey, Mizuki. It's me," and relaxes.

"Koujaku," he says, and unlocks to let him in.

Koujaku gives him a lazily familiar smile and lifts a hand. "Sorry. I know you're closed, but some of the guys said they saw you heading in here, and I figured if your first act out of the hospital was to drink, you shouldn't do it alone."

That startles a laugh out of him, and he ducks his head a little, almost embarrassed. "Am I that obvious?"

"Maybe. It's understandable."

"Yes, yes. Come in and stop letting the inside air out."

Koujaku enters, and Mizuki locks up again behind him. "I'm not asking to drink for free," Koujaku informs him before he can even bring the subject up. "This is a bar, so I'll pay, even when I'm here out of the kindness of my heart to keep the bartender company."

"How kind. Does the leader of Beni-Shigure have business to discuss with the leader of Dry Juice, or is it all to be alcohol?"

"Just the alcohol."

"Too kind."

Mizuki pours, then slides in on a stool next to Koujaku. Koujaku's eyes are roaming the tattoo designs with a far-away gaze, and Mizuki follows them, sighs. Perhaps he should pack them up and shut down business. He doesn't want to, but the idea of continuing doesn't have appeal either.

It's like Koujaku can read his thoughts. "What are you going to do about the tattoos."

"Other people's, or mine?"

"Up to you which you want to talk about."

Mizuki considers this, swirling his whiskey in his glass, gazing down at the reflection of lights in the amber liquid with his lips twisted in a bitter half-smile. "I don't know."

"About which?"

"Either."

Koujaku sighs. "Can I see?"

Mizuki doesn't need to ask what. He hesitates over it, but Koujaku is a friend, and Beni-Shigure has always stood at his side despite not being his own team, his own family. Koujaku was with Aoba and the others when they came to stop him. Slowly, he lifts his hands to his throat, unwinds the bandages there.

Koujaku tsks, the sound rough. "...Are you going to get it removed?"

"I don't know," Mizuki says. "I don't want it. But it feels a little like even if I go through the process of having them come off, I'll see it when I look in the mirror. Ah, besides, with skin as dark as mine, it'll probably scar. Maybe I'll just black out the Morphine tag and do something on top of the black smear."

He's always preferred more delicate tattoos. If his skin is going to be this dark, he'll tattoo delicate lines in white ink and create beauty out of negative space. He hasn't wanted a huge black smear across his throat with the proof of his weakness drawn into the middle, but there it is. 

"...I understand," Koujaku says.

Mizuki laughs softly; Koujaku can't understand what it was like. To give up your pride to another group and let them mark things on you; to lose control over yourself, your mind, in the presence of that other group's power. He feels like the tattoo is less ink, less a symbol, and more a scar on his psyche. As he was recovering, he'd see them standing over the hospital bed with their twin green-blue eyes glittering in the darkness, with their white teeth bared in mimicry of a normal human smile. _Hold still. You belong to us now._ He'd screamed and cried and he is afraid, still, that he'll fall under that drugging numbness again, that the black background of the tattoo will suffuse his mind and trap him in that space where he is alone, lacks families, lacks friends, and has nothing but the desire to become powerful enough to let nothing go again.

The silence has stretched on too long. "I understand," Koujaku says again, with a firm tone, and Mizuki glances up at him.

Koujaku is holding his bangs back from his face, has them shoved back with a hand, the other still holding his drink, elbows on the table. Mizuki reaches out, traces a finger in the air over the swirling marks there. 

"Koujaku," Mizuki says.

"The truth is, I'm a monster," Koujaku says. He downs his drink and slides the glass over to Mizuki, who pours. "I'm a beast."

"You didn't ask for those."

"It's like yours."

"Is it?"

"My face. My back. My body."

Mizuki sips his own drink and watches Koujaku and his self-effacing smile. Koujaku, as he knows him, is not a beast, nor a monster. Koujaku is a polite young man, a little too affectionate with the ladies, but a tender person. He helps the helpless and gathered his own family around him because of how genuinely admirable he was. Even when Mizuki had been at his worst, at his lowest while seeing his own team dissolve, he remembered Koujaku calling out to him. There's nothing in Koujaku that doesn't want to treat others kindly, he has thought. But people might say the same about him. Dry Juice, a big family that will welcome anyone who comes to it with open arms. 

"The truth is that I try to live every day the opposite from how I know I truly am," Koujaku says, smiling into his drink. "I became a hairdresser -- why? To handle sharp objects around delicate, unsuspecting women every day, until using them to create art instead of harm was the norm for me? Something like that. To be the delicate and respected Koujaku. To lead my team in kindness and empathy, and strike only with the back of my sword until my muscles knew nothing else. And it's not because I don't want to be this way. Left to my own devices, I should be this way."

"Have _you_ thought of getting them removed?" Mizuki asks after a long moment.

Koujaku sighs, drains his drink, holds his cup out. Mizuki refills it, and does not ask for money. "Of course," he says. "But you know how that works better than anyone."

"Hm? The body reabsorbs the ink -- ah," Mizuki says. "Of course."

"At least in this form, I recognize what they are," Koujaku says. "If they become free-form, if they sink past this layer of my skin, then what?"

"Then what," Mizuki echoes. "This is absurd. The idea is absurd."

"It is."

Mizuki puts one hand to the front of his throat, cups it. He can't feel his tattoo between his hand and his throat, of course -- he missed the tender and raw stage of it during the whole being crazy thing, and technically it just feels like skin now. He can feel the warmth of his hand, his throat, the pressure of his adam's apple, but despite knowing he couldn't technically feel or notice these things, he feels like he can feel it there, throbbing, a presence that his own ink had never caused before. "It's absurd," he repeats, softly.

"At first, I thought you were in on it," Koujaku says. "When we first met, I mean."

"What-?"

Koujaku nods to the framed design on Mizuki's bar. "...he's the one who inked me."

Mizuki turns and stares at it. A fish design, it was a simple sketch he'd received from an idol of his. He still remembers the man's smile as he inked the page and handed it over. _From one professional to another._ "...Ryuuhou was?"

"Yeah," Koujaku says. "That's why I asked about it. It became clear pretty quickly that you were just a fan of his work, however."

For a long moment, Mizuki does nothing. He doesn't know what to think, to feel. At this point, realizing that the things you'd come to rely on as simply normal, simply admirable, were unreliable -- that isn't a big step, he thinks, is it? He reaches over and turns the picture face down and Koujaku sighs softly.

"Sorry," Koujaku says.

"You don't have to be."

"I feel like it's not unrelated," Koujaku says. "You and me. Our situations. Even though they seem it -- how many people could possibly be capable of creating mind control tattoos? Independently?"

Mizuki nods, still looking at his overturned picture. "I'm pretty up on tattoo talk," he says. "I think if there was a big mind control tattoo underground I'd have heard about it."

He can feel himself slipping into the point where it's so depressing it's become funny, can feel his speech patterns starting to go that way. Koujaku laughs, though not like it's really actually that amusing, and they share a look that kind of acknowledges this moment.

"So what now?" Mizuki asks, finally.

"Ryuuhou is still out there," Koujaku says. "Morphine too."

Mizuki rubs his throat again. "I'm too aware. Don't think I didn't expect them to visit me in the hospital. But I suppose in the end it wasn't personal. I was just a tool." Somehow that feels more insulting. If it had been about him, about his choices, some kind of vendetta, then he can face it; knowing that he was simply a convenient venue to get at Aoba is insulting and painful. Even if he was made a tool, he was also thrown away. There is no meaning to what happened to him beyond what purpose it served them at the time, not even any deeper plot.

"And I was a moment's entertainment," Koujaku says in a soft agreement and a similar sense of disgust, not so much for the people who had done this to them as for themselves. "Which doesn't mean that we wouldn't be of interest again, should we cross their paths and which doesn't mean that others won't fall under their pens."

"Yes. Dry Juice..." Mizuki's throat tightens, and he shakes his head. He wasn't the only one who had gone through this, though he'd been the only one who'd been broken at the end. But most of Dry Juice had disappeared -- gone along with Morphine, wherever they'd taken off to. "...If nothing else, I need to see if I can save them."

Koujaku says, softly, "It'll take a long time. Probably years. It took me so long to even get news of Ryuuhou that I've just resumed living a normal life -- well, and I'm probably healthier for it. I haven't seen him since. I doubt it'll be easier to track down Morphine, nor figure out whatever their ties are."

"I don't expect it to be easy. Recovery never is."

With a laugh, Koujaku puts his glass down. "Ink me."

Mizuki jerks his head up, looking at Koujaku a little uncertainly. "You hate your ink."

"I hate the ink that was forced on me. But, we're making a pact, aren't we? That can settle into our skin with at least the depth that our violation has." He holds out his bare arm, his unmarked arm. "Something small and delicate. You do specialize in the delicate type, don't you?"

"A common symbol, huh?"

"You were going to redo your neck too in some way."

"Haven't thought of what yet."

"Get a neck corset like mine."

"Not really my style."

Koujaku laughs again, and there's some relief to it. "You'll ink me, then?"

"Not tonight," Mizuki says. "I don't ink anyone who's had too much to drink. It's a professional's pride."

This laugh is genuine, heartfelt, and brings tears with it. "That's Mizuki. It's nice to put myself in a professional's hands."

In the end, he does ink them both -- not then, but a week or two later, after they've discussed more fully what they want. He doesn't ink Koujaku's bare arm after all, talks him out of it -- since Koujaku has hated his tattoos, anything dramatic enough to balance out his other side feels as though it'll be too much. But he leans Koujaku back in the chair and says "Are you sure?"

"We can have this much in common as well."

And so he puts a gentle, narrow outline of white ink around the tattoo on Koujaku's face. It surrounds the tattoo he has already, and in a way emphasizes it, but in doing so it also encases it, keeps it from seeming so directly on his skin. He puts in a few gentle patterns around it of his own design, though he keeps it minimal and fine, just thin lines that nobody is likely to see, because Koujaku keeps his hair over his face. But Koujaku will see it; Koujaku, when he glances in the mirror, will see the white edges, Koujaku, when he emerges from the shower with his hair wet and has to look at himself, will see it.

As he had planned, he inks the heart in black on his throat, and then he, too, edges it in white, wraps it around his throat like a corset after all, covers it with patterns and whorls which reach out and contain the black. It's thicker than he likes his own art, and he still will always see what happened when he sees that black smear across the front of his throat. And, of course, unlike the ink that was put on them, it isn't magic.

But it's a symbol, and that's not without meaning.


End file.
